President Obama recently sent his new jobs proposal
to Congress with a plan to pay for the $447 billion package by raising taxes on
the wealthy. The healthcare system, the
huge military spending as a result of 9/11 and the stupid foreign policy that provoked
it, the very low taxes for the rich and corporations -- are fundamental
problems that have to be dealt with if there's going to be anything like
successful economic and social development in the United States, he points out.
As Texas Gov. Rick Perry calls Social
Security a "Ponzi scheme," and Democrats buy into the narrative that
the program is in crisis, Chomsky notes that "to worry about a possible
problem 30 years from now, which can be fixed with a little bit of tampering
here and there, as was done in 1983, makes absolutely no sense at all -- unless
you're trying to destroy the program."

The
origins of 9/11 according to Ron Paul, with a follow-up from Chomsky

Congress Member Ron Paul of Texas recently drew boos
from the crowd and a rebuke from other candidates on the podium when he
criticized U.S. foreign policy in pointing out the roots of 9/11 that most
Americans don't want to face:

We're under terrorist threat because we occupy so
many countries, he said. We're in 130 of them. We have 900 bases around the
world. And we're going broke because of
it.

The purpose of al-Qaeda was to attack us so that we
would go over there where they can target us more easily. And they have been doing exactly that and have
been bleeding our economy of resources and bankrupting our country at the same
time. They have initiated more attacks
against American interests per month than occurred in all the years before
9/11. But what would you expect them to
do? Our troops are there, in the
hundreds of thousands, occupying their land!
And if we think that we can do that and not have retaliation, we are
deluded.

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To be honest with ourselves we must squarely face the
obvious question:What
would we do if another country, say China, did to us what we are doing
to all those countries over there?

This idea that the whole Muslim world is
'responsible' for attacking us just because we're "free' and prosperous is
silly. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda clearly
told us that they attacked America because, a) we had military
bases on their holy land in Saudi Arabia, b) we militarily and financially
assist the Israelis in their persecution of the Palestinians, and c) we have
been bombing and otherwise killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, including
thousands of children, for more than a decade, with sanctions as well as bombs.

If this had been done to America, what would your
reaction be? So how can we blame them
for their reactions, without being stupid?

Chomsky
responds to what Ron Paul said

I think what Ron Paul said is completely un controversial. You can read the same thing in government
documents. You can find it in polls. Maybe people don't like to hear it, but, as I've
mentioned before, it goes back to the 1950s.

Right after 9/11, the Wall Street Journal, to its
credit, did a study of privileged Muslims, sometimes called "monied
Muslims" -- people in the Muslim world who are deeply embedded in the U.S.
global project: lawyers, directors of multinational
corporations and so on, not the general population. And their concerns were very much like what
Eisenhower and the National Security Council were concerned about in the 1950s:
Then as now, there was a lot of antagonism to U.S. policy in the region,
partly because of its support of dictators that are blocking democracy and
development, just as the National Security Council concluded in 1958.

And by 2001, there were much more specific things: particularly a lot of anger about the U.S. backing for Israeli occupation of the
Occupied Territories, settlements, the bitter oppression of the Palestinians,
and also, something that isn't discussed much here but that meant a lot
there--and remember, these are privileged Muslims, leaders, i.e. those who kind
of carry out, implement the general U.S. economic and social policies in the
region. That other thing, besides the U.S.
support of Israeli crimes, was the sanctions against Iraq. This was 2001, remember. The sanctions against Iraq were brutal and
destructive. They alone killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims, many of them
children who died because of the filthy drinking water that resulted from the
U.S. blockade on equipment and chemicals necessary to repair and reestablish
functional water filtration systems. Both
of the international diplomats who administered the Oil-for-Food program -- distinguished
international diplomats like Denis Halliday, and then Hans von Sponeck -- resigned
in protest because they regarded the sanctions as genocidal. The sanctions were, in effect, a kind of a
mass slaughter of Iraqis. And were actually
strengthening Saddam Hussein. They were compelling the population to rely
on him just for survival. These then
were major U.S. crimes of the 1990s. And
privileged Muslims, monied Muslims, in the Saudi Arabia, elsewhere, were
bitterly opposed to this, not because they hate our freedoms, but because they despised America's
murderous and brutal policies.

How
U.S. foreign policy helped bin Laden and hurt the USA

According to at least one CIA analyst, the U.S. actually
became Osama bin Laden's biggest ally by allowing itself to be drawn into so
many wars abroad. Bin Laden wanted to
draw the United States into what intelligence agencies called a trap, which
would inflame and incite hostility in the Muslim world, which he hoped would
help mobilize people to his cause. I
don't think that happened to the degree he wanted it to, but it did help, and is still helping, to bankrupt the U.S. There was a recent estimate, in a study out of Brown University, which estimated the cost
just of the two wars at about $4 trillion.
If you count in the costs of homeland security, which now employs a million
people all across the country, the total cost is probably double that. So, between the wars, the housing bubble, and
the Bush tax cuts for the rich, . . our leaders, our banks, and our big
corporations have created the economic
crisis we're now in.

Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've (more...)